


The Ties That Bind Us Together Are Many

by DilynAliceBlake



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: A/B/O, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, F/M, Found Family, Omegaverse, alpha!pink diamond, alpha!spinel, aromantic!peridot, asexual!Peridot, beta!Greg, intersex!amethyst, omega!steven, she just isnt about that intimacy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-21 17:16:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20697161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DilynAliceBlake/pseuds/DilynAliceBlake
Summary: I wrote an omegaverse fic.  I don't know what more you want from me, except to know that it is, beyond all reason, exceptionally fluffy.





	1. Chapter 1

Steven presents at a relatively normal age for doing so, thirteen not being unreasonably young for puberty to make itself known. It would have been an easy ride if anyone had been expecting him to be anything but a beta. As it was, no one was expecting for him to wake up sweaty and aching, fever going on 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

This isn’t the stone age or the sixteenth century. Even the arranged marriages of the eighteen hundreds are long past. Steven’s first thought, when he realizes why he feels so terrible, isn’t of some forced mating or unwanted wedding. Steven’s first thought is, understandably, that the internet was a terrible enough place without strangers offering to knock him up on the regular. Just the thought of the harassment he’s going to face has him groaning and rolling over to go back to sleep.

For most of the morning, that’s all there is to it. Steven tries to stay hydrated, reorganizes his nicnacs, and throws out the tea in the fridge that was starting to sour. The fact that he could now smell the twist to the sweet beverage without even opening said fridge is secondary.

Around eleven O’clock Amethyst rolls out of bed, and whines at him for throwing the tea away.

“It was starting to smell soured,” he complains. 

“Dude, nuh uh. I had at least another day before you guys noticed; Garnet doesn’t go in the fridge.

“Wait! Steven! You got your gender! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I already had a gender, Amethyst. This one is secondary.”

“Secondary shmeckondary, I’m calling Greg.”

“Uhhhh, do you have to? It’ll be over by tonight-”

“No way! Baby Steven is growing up, you gotta have your family here to embarass you.”

His fussing is largely performative, something they both know, and it doesn’t take long at all for Greg to show up.

“You’re an Omega?  _ Where are my parenting books? _ ”

“Oh geez, Dad, not the books. Can’t you just wing the supportiveness this time? Please?”

“I’m sorry, Steve-O, your old man doesn’t mean to embarrass you. I’m just not exactly equipped for this sort of talk.”

“There’s lots of stuff you haven’t been equipped for, and you did a great job being my dad with all of it,” Steven argues. Greg agrees, which is just as well because Amethyst had long ago turned “A First Time Parent’s Guide to Presentation” into the globs of spitballs currently decorating her room. Well, not the diagrams, but those were a little racy to start the kid off with.

“Bud, you’re burning up!” 

“I’m sure it’s normal,” Steven tries to insist. Amethyst watches on with amusement while Steven is corralled back into his bed with a damp rag and one of every drink in the house. 

“Daaaad,” Steven whines, “I’m fine, you don’t have to baby me!”

Of course, when he says that, he starts getting a migraine from the over-stimulation of all the new smells, and the relief of the familiar scent of his own pillow is welcome.

“Can you turn the light off?” he asks from where he’s face-down in said pillow, and he rests for a moment in the dark. 

Downstairs, Greg is dialing Vidalia’s number.

“Why you callin’ Vee?” Amethyst asks, stacking layers onto a truly atrocious sandwich.

“She’s an alpha, she knows about this stuff.”

“Yeah, sorry about your book man.” Amethyst says, contrite. 

“Don’t sweat it kid. It was probably for the best. From what I remember, those diagrams weren’t the most accurate.”

“Yeah, they definitely took some artistic license,” she snorts, and bites into her mess of a meal.

  
  
Greg has to dial twice, and the phone has been ringing a truly interminable amount of time. He knows that he shouldn’t be this stressed. He’s certainly been through worse, his years dealing with aliens and raising Steven. Heck, no one’s life is even in danger this time! Still, all his years as a father have left him no less anxious about doing something wrong when it comes to his son. All the practice has made him an expert at dealing with the stress, however.

“Vidalia? Hey, it’s me Greg. No, no, I’m fine. Steven’s just presented is all. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting it either. Kid’s great at surprising me. Anyway, I was calling to ask you for some advice- No, yeah, we already got rid of the book. No, really? They let them publish that? I guess times have changed more than I thought.” Alright, I have a pen, I’m writing the list now. Okay. Okay. Got it. Is that all? Nothing else? Oh, well, okay. Thanks. Bye.”

The list, while he was writing it, seemed reasonable. Most of it was honestly just common sense. Then he re-reads it, and gets as far as item one before he’s panicking again.

  1. Don’t panic, it’s not a good smell when your nose is coming in.

Oh, jeez, all he’s been  _ doing  _ is panicking! How can he already have messed up this bad? He’s probably making poor Steven miserable! Since the first item is so obviously failed, Greg skips to step two.

  1. Keep him hydrated because he’s sweating.

That one was much easier. Greg’s already given Steven lots of drinks, so maybe the rest won't be so difficult either. 

  1. Buy supplies. SNACKS.

The last is underlined three times, so it must have been really important. Alright, supplies and snacks. Greg can do that. 

“Steven, I’m going to the store to get you some supplies, do you need anything?”

“Some chaps,” Steven yells down, and then, after a beat, “and some butter bars! And the little cookies in the blue packet! ...Some chicken wings too!”

Well, it seems Vidalia wasn’t kidding about heats burning calories. Greg grabs his keys off the counter and heads for the store.

Greg isn’t gone for long before Amethyst is hopping up onto Steven’s bed. He groans in protest at the bouncing.

“Why is it like this?” he bemoans, and Amethyst rolls her eyes good naturedly at his dramatics. 

“Just wait until you get a real heat, it’ll make this seem like a cakewalk.”

“Amethyst,” he pouts, “I don’t wanna think about that. Aren’t I suffering enough?”

“I dunno Steven, I feel like you haven’t really reached your embarrassment quota.”

She forms her hand into a makeshift megaphone.

“Hey everybody, Steven is old enough to get laid!”

No one else is home to hear her, but she still gets shoved off the floor and relegated to snack retrieval duty for her teasing.

“Go help Dad with snacks.”

“Okay, but I’m helping eat them.”

“That’s not fair, you don’t even need food! You get your energy from light!”

Of course, Greg has bought enough snacks for it not to be a problem even remotely. 

There are Chaps in four flavors, five different types of cookies, the requested Mr. Peanut’s Butter Bars, an entire cake with the word Congratulations scrawled across the top in icing, and some of everything from the drive-thru down the road.

Among the haul of food there are also three different sets of slick absorbent underwear, four scent neutralizers, and two boxes of condoms.

“Dad! I’m not even dating anybody!”

“Well put them in your room anyway! You can never be to careful! You could end up pregnant, or-”

Steven begins walking the food up to his room at the “or.”

He’s heard enough about health class from Connie, thank-you-very-much, he isn’t interested in the same lecture from his father. Hearing it the first time was bad enough.

Later, when Steven is sleeping soundly surrounded by unopened snack packages, a gentle purr accompanying his usual snore, Amethyst punches Greg companionably on the shoulder.

“You done good,” she tells him, and even with his son sleeping contentedly above, it’s still nice to hear it.


	2. Chapter 2

“Alright,” Garnet says, a day and a half into a mission that she had said was vital, “We can go home now.”

“What?” Pearl demands, “What about the-”

“There was never any monster,” Garnet tells her, calm and guiltless as someone who knows the outcome of every potential decision. “I lied.”

“Why would you  _ make up _ a corrupted gem?”

“I thought it would be better to get you out of the house while Steven was presenting.”

Pearl’s panic is instantaneous.

“He what! We need to get home! What if he needs me? What if something goes wrong?”

“And that’s why I waited to tell you until after it was over,” Garnet says, watching Pearl take off running.

Steven is fine of course. Even the fever has passed completely by the time they make it back, and Pearl contents herself with replacing all Steven’s soaps with scentless ones so that when he wakes to shower the smell won’t bother his newly honed senses.

“Oh hey, your eyes are back to normal,” Amethyst says when Steven is scrubbing the last of the water out of his hair with a towel on his way to the kitchen.

“My eyes?”

“Yeah, they went all wonky when you were presenting. Like pink and stuff.”

Steven shrugs it off, because maybe it was just another one of those gem things. Amethyst had never seen a diamond, and didn’t have the experience to know what the shape of his pupils meant. Maybe if she had known, the entire ordeal that happened later could have been avoided. Still, things happened how they happened.

What the argument was about doesn’t matter. It was probably just some trivial teenage moodiness anyway. What does matter is that Steven’s emotions were volatile and his new instincts on edge.

The cup Garnet is holding cracks when she sees the way his eyes change with his temper.

“Pearl,” she grates out, because there’s no way Pearl didn’t know. A Rose Quartz soldier had no reason to have a Pearl, and Pearl herself was too loyal to defect into a rebellion without serious cause.

“What?” Pearl asks, not having seen yet, but when she does the guilt creeps up her posture to make its home evident on her face.

“You  _ knew _ ,” Garnet accuses. It isn’t remotely a question.

“What did Pearl know?” Steven asks, whatever had him riled now forgotten in the sudden break in Garnet’s composure.

“You’re telling him,” Garnet says flatly to Pearl.

“I can’t tell him! Why don’t you tell him?”

“ _ I’m _ not the one who’s been keeping it from him. It’s your lie, so it’s your responsibility."

Pearl tells him.

Steven isn’t mad at her for the telling. He’s incensed that she was never going to.

“You weren’t even going to  _ tell  _ me?” he accuses, because he has to know. Surely she wasn’t intending to keep this from him forever. Surely she wasn’t planning to lie to him about who he really was for his  _ entire life _ .

“I hardly knew you’d present like this! You never showed any obvious signs of regal lineage; I had hoped it wouldn’t come up.”

“...You really weren’t going to tell me,” he realizes. It chips away at the trust he once held for her, and Pearl must know that.

“I wanted to. So many times, Steven.”

“Wanting to isn’t the same,” he says softly, because the wanting in this case couldn’t be enough. Not with a secret so big.

“I know,” she responds, just as hushed, “and for what it's worth, I’m sorry.”


End file.
